Evil Genius

CCS wrote:Alright true, I guess it wouldn't make a lot of sense to leave out parts of the story considering how few Berserk chapters come out per year.
You guys are a lot more polite that SK.net

Well I used to go on SK.net and every time you were a new comer they'd bash anything you'd say. You'd write up three sentences and they would break up each sentence into five parts trying to describe why you're not a know all of Berserk like they are. As much as they have useful information, it's easier talking to a wall. I forgot the moderators name Aaz or something, he was quite pretentious.. but I digress, just a healthy tip to stay away from there unless you have the answer to life, or else...

To come back to the subject, I also find the first three volumes to be the lesser of his work, maybe because we don't really care for Guts much and don't know how he got to that point yet. I'd say they should start with the Golden Age but incorporate the first volumes after the eclipse (which is when all this happens) instead of breaking up the Blackswordsman Arc into two, keeping a constant continuation to the movies/ova. It would also keep the eclipse as a surprise to newcomers because those first three volumes foreshadows a little too much. They give us enough clues during the golden age arc that the Berserk World is fantastical (Behelit, Skull Knight, Wyald, Zodd etc..) so yeah my opinion.

EDIT: Haha I went just for kicks to see your post on SK.net and as usual they bash you and question if you actually like Berserk or not... man they don't change. The first three volumes were nowhere as deep and as moving as what followed, the reason being we didn't know who Guts was. Take the entire story and yes that part ends up significant but as an opener.. I could see how some people would disagree with Berserk's greatness. All you mentioned was that you felt like it was the weaker side of Berserk and bam, you don't understand anything. Well depending on how many times you read the manga, the first time you DON'T know whats really going on. You find out as you go and that's where the first three volumes become really interesting. If the animation adaptation sticks to the original format with good atrwork (which the first three volumes didn't really have compared to the rest of the manga) it could work quite well.

You have to start the story somewhere and the first chapters of the Golden Arc don't really tell you what's going to come later. It makes sense then, from a storytelling point of view, to start the story at a point where you can give a taste of what to expect in a digestible portion.

In 3 volumes you get that Guts is actively rebelling against every monster in search of Griffith so he can take him out, and in spite of frantic, desperate attacks on every apostle, he's not able to get any closer to that goal. Aside from that, you get a taste of the mythology with the monsters, the eclipse and the behelit (as well as Puck himself). And also a few short stories about a count that turned to an evil power out of despair over his wife's betrayal; the citizens who are subjugated by the count's power; the God Hand who are pulling the strings (giving an idea as to why Guts is hunting down Griffith); the count's daughter trying to survive as her own world is falling apart; and Guts' inner struggle with himself and his emotions. All this showing several tidbits of information that explain the overall plot to Berserk and how the rest of the story will be told. The first 3 volumes are do nothing more than present Berserk to the reader.

I don't believe the anime has to include every single detail from the manga, but that whole arc about the Count would serve as a good first episode in the anime (I always thought the Baron arc was a weak choice for the first episode in the current anime).

Yeah The Count was a bit more descriptive, I understand what you mean by presenting the story, I just find that it tells you too much. I knew Griffith was gonna betray Guts in a horrible way, what way i did not know but I saw it coming which takes away from the surprise effect. I don't know, it was a good arc (being the black swordsman arc and all) but I always thought it lacked a bit as an opener. There's great stuff in the first three volumes but its too soon, and we get to know too much.

Where would you think it should start then? The story starting on the Golden Arc makes sense chronologically, but it does not prepare you at all for what's going to come, and while I agree that it would make more of an impact on the reader finding out that Griffith betrays Guts during the Eclipse, there's so much conflict at that moment that you might risk alienating the reader (since the reader has been reading a story with relatively little fantasy and then all of a sudden hell breaks loose and there's all these monsters around). The way Miura presents it, the story begins with Guts as an adult, and the Golden Arc is simply back story, you might think that the Golden Arc bears most of the story of Berserk but keep in mind his work is not finished and that arc could end up being much smaller.

Also, knowing that Guts and Griffith are going to have a conflict at some point and building up that tension slowly over time is sort of a hook to keep reading, and as I said before, giving you a taste of the overall work that's to come in 3 short volumes instead of forcing you to read 11 to 12 volumes just to be able to grasp that same idea is a good storytelling technique. Presenting the thesis at the beginning and building from there. I'm not saying that's how it has to be done, but that's how he chose to do it, and having seen how the story progresses from there, I can't think of telling the story any other way.

Another important point is that the original black swordman arc goes a long way into making it clear just how crappy the world of berserk is, and setting a consistently grim tone for the rest of the story.
It's one of the oldest tricks in literature, really, the "how did it come to this? (or "that", from our outsider's perspective)" question hovering at all times over every event after we are introduced to the story.
If a person were to, say, completely ignore the first three volumes just because of the poorly drawn artwork and outrageously clichéd lines, he'd quickly develop a mindset that would make the Eclipse seem like a Diabolus Ex Machina in all it's glory, because the hints we get during the golden arc, cryptic as they are, could probably be dismissed by a critical reader as "shit the author added after writing the diabolus in order to make it seem less bullshit-y".
I think Vargas' death (and latter reappearance in the vortex) is fundamental to illustrating the nature of the story, and that cutting it out for space's sake would be detrimental to the overall quality of this new adaptation.


Hahahaha, no. Everything above this line is total bullshit.
The real reason I don't want the Slug Count arc cut out is because I want to see Vargas's face, animated and in color, as he crawl/floats out of the vortex to drag the Count into hell. That scene was awesome, and made me laugh and weep simultaneously.

I believe they should definitely be starting with the Black Swordsman arc. That arc (along with the Conviction arc) is what I see as Berserk's true colors. Guts wandering alone, a complete madman, slaughtering every apostle in his path. The first three volumes are an excellent entry point for any reader/viewer, seeing Guts, and Midland, in their most desperate of times. That emotionally sets you up for what's to come. The whole time you're going through the Golden Age arc, you have the knowledge that Guts is now just a crazed nomad, blindly throwing himself into seemingly impossible fights, and enjoying his brutal revenge. Knowing the inevitable trainwreck is coming makes the Golden Age arc have much more impact on you. Seeing the Band of the Hawk and Guts struggle so hard, for what you know is ultimately nothing, is some pretty grim stuff to take in. If the new adaption just started out with the Golden Age arc, then more or less out of no where throws the Eclipse at the viewer, and slaughters the entire cast, most viewers aren't going to be really pleased with that. There are plenty of people that hated the ending to the current anime alone.

I agree. Without the foreshadowing of the first three volumes, the Eclipse wouldn't work nearly as well, and even the Golden Age wouldn't be nearly as powerful if you didn't know, the entire time, that all of this is ultimately doomed.

I agree entirely with the first three volumes being well placed.. but the only gripe I had with it was the fact that from the beginning they let us know "Griffith" was Guts "enemy", and if you keep that name in mind the whole time you know something bad is gonna happen. Maybe there would have been a way for Miura to not make it as obvious as he did. We know from the start of the first 3 volumes that Griffith betrays Guts or wrongs him in some way, thus the whole time we're just waiting on how its gonna happen. That's what I meant by the "surprise" being watered down. We don't know how its gonna happen, but we know it will. Maybe if they wouldn't have let us known exactly who it was, give clues to who Femto was without giving us the answer I would have been better with the first three volumes. I found it too direct is all, too much information too soon.

Guts[LCF] wrote:I agree entirely with the first three volumes being well placed.. but the only gripe I had with it was the fact that from the beginning they let us know "Griffith" was Guts "enemy", and if you keep that name in mind the whole time you know something bad is gonna happen. Maybe there would have been a way for Miura to not make it as obvious as he did. We know from the start of the first 3 volumes that Griffith betrays Guts or wrongs him in some way, thus the whole time we're just waiting on how its gonna happen. That's what I meant by the "surprise" being watered down. We don't know how its gonna happen, but we know it will. Maybe if they wouldn't have let us known exactly who it was, give clues to who Femto was without giving us the answer I would have been better with the first three volumes. I found it too direct is all, too much information too soon.

You're meant to know something bad is going to happen. That's the entire point. It wasn't supposed to be a surprise. It wasn't a writing flaw on his part, you just feel the story should have been told differently.

brunoafh wrote:

Guts[LCF] wrote:I agree entirely with the first three volumes being well placed.. but the only gripe I had with it was the fact that from the beginning they let us know "Griffith" was Guts "enemy", and if you keep that name in mind the whole time you know something bad is gonna happen. Maybe there would have been a way for Miura to not make it as obvious as he did. We know from the start of the first 3 volumes that Griffith betrays Guts or wrongs him in some way, thus the whole time we're just waiting on how its gonna happen. That's what I meant by the "surprise" being watered down. We don't know how its gonna happen, but we know it will. Maybe if they wouldn't have let us known exactly who it was, give clues to who Femto was without giving us the answer I would have been better with the first three volumes. I found it too direct is all, too much information too soon.

You're meant to know something bad is going to happen. That's the entire point. It wasn't supposed to be a surprise. It wasn't a writing flaw on his part, you just feel the story should have been told differently.

I never said it was a writing flaw, I said it felt like it was giving out too much information, its called an opinion, you're entitled to yours and I am to mine but don't start putting words in for me when I never said this. Miura gave us the answer to who the antagonist was before its time, instead of foreshadowing, which is where I personally think it could have been done differently. We knew something went wrong and that something bad was gonna happen without having to know that Griffith was THAT reason, it would have been a bigger shock but still foreshadowed. Never mentioned that Miura's writing is flawed, just thought that a different approach to the Griffith becoming Femto and us knowing it from the start could have been more interesting.

On that note, or a side-note... Where the hell is Miura anyway? Is he ok?

Touchy, aren't we? I guess you'll just have to re-write Berserk and show us how it's done!

You're splitting hairs here, thinking that it was not the right moment to reveal the information and calling that a flaw is hardly a misunderstanding. But I digress, what I can't understand is what part of the eclipse did you expect would happen because you knew Griffith's name from the beginning.

Yeah, it wasn't so much about unexpected betrayal as it was about betrayal plus grand mass slaughter.
Now, I know this is just not going to be fair (for any of the works involved), but I'm going to compare Berserk with Naruto, if only because I know most of you are at least superficially acquainted with both works.
Bear with me, it's gonna be very, very short.
Betrayal is a big part in both plots, and yet very few of us could say with a straight face that Sasuke's betrayal is comparable to that of Griffith, simply because of the extents to which Griffith goes in his.
It's one thing to "betray" someone in the sense that you abandon him when he needs you (in which case revealing that betrayal beforehand would really spoil it), and it's a completely different thing to, well, to bring about the Eclipse on everyone who ever loved you because of your own shattered dreams.
The Eclipse, as an event, is not as shocking as it is because we didn't expect something like it, it's shocking because of how intense it is in its complete and thorough elimination of every single element we had come to be familiar with until that point of the story. We really do get the impression that everything that was until that point ended with it.
It's not the "What", it's the "How".
Besides, I personally thought Griffith's complex relation with Gutts was made all the more intense because we knew from the onset (is that the right word, onset? it sounds right, but I'm not sure if it makes sense) that it was doomed.

EDIT: I just deleted the last phrase I had written in this post. This isn't just my opinion, for fucks sake. Not revealing that it was Griffith who betrays Gutts would have felt forced and stupid. Twists are usually just cheap, crappy tricks to cover up bad writing and inconsistent characterization.

The Japanese Twitter page says next release is April 8th, with additional info about the anime project. Woot woot!

Also a little blurb about the project : [spoiler]http://66.196.80.202/babelfish/translat ... 10303.html[/spoiler]

lon3vvolf wrote:The Japanese Twitter page says next release is April 8th, with additional info about the anime project. Woot woot!

Also a little blurb about the project : [spoiler]http://66.196.80.202/babelfish/translat ... 10303.html[/spoiler]

Nice! So it looks like it's confirmed that the new series will cover the entirety of Berserk. Now if only they'll do a good job of it...

Istvan wrote:

lon3vvolf wrote:The Japanese Twitter page says next release is April 8th, with additional info about the anime project. Woot woot!

Also a little blurb about the project : [spoiler]http://66.196.80.202/babelfish/translat ... 10303.html[/spoiler]

Nice! So it looks like it's confirmed that the new series will cover the entirety of Berserk. Now if only they'll do a good job of it...

I have faith. That's really good news.

Starnum wrote: I have faith.

[/laconic] Don't.[/]

oh yee of little faith... where there's a will there is a berserker....or berserk will always find a way... or something like that

So I wonder what details got announced in Young Animal on the 8th.

brunoafh wrote:So I wonder what details got announced in Young Animal on the 8th.

Same here, don't keep us in the dark!!

So anyway.

The Berserk anime. It's gonna suck.

So what's the most recent news on the anime? Is it actually in production yet? Any estimated release dates?

Hahahhahaa, nice.

But I concur, the anime is gonna suck so hard it's going to render the very fabric of reality asunder, unleashing hordes of quasi-human neo-berserk fanboys upon the world. They're all going to wear black t-shirts with brightly colored depictions of Gutts passionately kissing Griffith, and proudly declare that they have no intent on reading the manga, which they've heard it's pretty boring anyway. Most of them are also going to drone on and on about the new character, "Guttsica", whose assertiveness, good looks and pendant to wear as little clothing as possible will most likely play a big role in them deciding she's the best character ever, and start a new trend in doushinji fanfiction called 'Berseksu", consisting mostly of ultra hardcore gutts-griffith yaoi and Gutssica bondage.
Guttsica will wear glasses, and purple armor.
Her death scene and later reappearance as a ghost will be considered a landmark in anime movie-making, and will ultimately overshadow every other aspect of Berserk.
God will die approximately 2 days after that becomes a widely accepted fact.


No one will notice.




...
Now, where are my pills? Has anyone seen them? I may have lost them.

um....news on the anime? Anyone? Please?